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Above all, it’s the emotions elicited by teaching that make it such a powerful vehicle for learning. Student tutors feel chagrin when their virtual pupils fail; when the characters succeed, they feel what one expert calls by the Yiddish term nachas. Don’t know that word? I had to learn it myself: “Pride and satisfaction that is derived from someone else’s accomplishment.”

On a subsequent test of their skills, the students who had observed agents using rules of reasoning to solve a problem “significantly outperformed” students who had only practiced applying the rules themselves.

A 2009 study of Betty’s Brain published in the Journal of Science Education and Technology found that students engaged in instructing her spent more time going over the material and learned it more thoroughly.

The cognitive transformations triggered by tools have two sides, paralleling the kinds of effects discussed above. One side is learning effects with the tool. This recognizes the changed functioning and expanded capability that takes place as the user uses and gets used to particular tools. Impact occurs through the redistribution of a task‰s cognitive load between persons and devices (e.g. Pea, 1993; Perkins, 1993), including symbol-handling devices (e.g,. a spell checker) or across persons, mediated by devices and symbol systems (telephones, fax machines). As these examples suggest, such tools are all around us, but their possibility also invites the design of special-purpose tools for supporting various cognitive functions. For instance, experiments have shown that a computerized Reading Partner that provides ongoing metacognitive-like guidance improves students‰ comprehension of texts while they read with the tool (Salomon, Globerson, & Guterman, 1991).

Social Mediation by Cultural Artifacts

The role of tools and symbol systems as both reflecting and affecting the human psyche has long been recognized. But it is mainly due to the Russian sociocultural tradition of Vygotsky (e.g., 1978), Luria (1981), and Leont‰ev (1981), and their Western interpreters (e.g,. Cole & Wertch, 1996), that scholarly attention has focused on tools as social mediators of learning. Here we use ‹toolsŠ in a broad sense, including not only physical implements but technical procedures like the algorithms of arithmetic and symbolic resources such as those of natural languages and mathematical and musical notation.